Those ever-inventive stock spammers have come up with a new twist. Animated GIFs, crazy-quilt backgrounds and letters jogged up or down half a line to make things hard for OCR readers are so last week. The new trend? ASCII art.

The Viagra spammers have flirted with this one for a while, so when I saw the first message my initial thought was that it was pill spam, and hit the delete key. It was only when I received a third one that I looked a little more closely.

The particular stock advertised in this interesting way has been pushed by image-based spam for the past few days. Certain characteristics of the image-based and ASCII art spams are similar enough to suggest that they're the work of the same spammer. I suspect — but can't prove — that much of the stock spam we see is the work of a single spammer, who is continuously refining his technique. It also looks as if he has now graduated to juggling multiple stocks simultaneously, so apparently the stock spam business is working for him.

It remains to be seen if this will work. It has the advantage of being difficult to filter — the numbers are randomized. The disadvantage is that it's also very hard to read. Any user whose mail client isn't set to use fixed-pitch fonts will just see a jumble of letters. Even if you use Courier or Monaco, you're quite likely to hit the delete key before your brain has time to register the symbol. After some initial messages that used a single line of characters for each stroke of the letter, the spammer has improved readability somewhat by using multiple characters to "thicken" the letters, but it's still marginal.

The real question is, would it make someone want to buy the stock? Would someone look at it and say "Look, a piece of unsolicited mail from a stranger who doesn't want me to know who he is, with a nonsense subject line and an ASCII art representation of a stock symbol. Sounds like a good investment. Maybe I should call my broker and get some of that ASCII-advertised action." A year ago, I wouldn't have said so, but the fact that stock spammers appear to be thriving (or struggling, depending on how you interpret the hugely-increased volume of stock spam lately) suggests that there's apparently no shortage of people who are eager to give their money to spammers on the slimmest of pretexts.